Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,1
by one up through the drainpipe in the floor. The intruders were obviously newcomers, foolishly scrounging for cockroaches when they could’ve been slurping custard off the fresh-baked pastries just down the hall.
Without making a sound or even disturbing the air, she stalked slowly toward the rats. Her eyes focused on them. Her ears picked up every sound they made. She could even smell their foul sewer stench. All the while, they went about their rotten, ratty business and had no idea she was there.
She stopped just a few feet behind them, hidden in the blackness of a shadow, poised for the leap. This was the moment she loved, the moment just before she lunged. Her body swayed slightly back and forth, tuning her angle of attack. Then she pounced. In one quick, explosive movement, she grabbed the squealing, writhing rats with her bare hands.
“Gotcha, ya nasty varmints!” she hissed.
The smaller rat squirmed in terror, desperate to get away, but the larger one twisted around and bit her hand.
“There’ll be none of that!” she snarled, clamping the rat’s neck firmly between her finger and thumb.
The rats wriggled wildly, but she kept a good, hard hold on them and wouldn’t let them go. It had taken her a while to learn that lesson when she was younger, that once you had them, you had to squeeze hard and hold on, no matter what, even if their little claws scratched you and their scaly tails curled around your hand like some sort of nasty gray snake.
Finally, after several seconds of vicious struggling, the exhausted rats realized they couldn’t escape her. They went still and stared suspiciously at her with their beady black eyes. Their sniveling little noses and wickedly long whiskers vibrated with fear. The rat who’d bit her slowly slithered his long, scaly tail around her wrist, wrapping it two times, searching for new advantage to pry himself free.
“Don’t even try it,” she warned him. Still bleeding from his bite, she was in no mood for his ratty schemes. She’d been bitten before, but she never did like it much.
Carrying the grisly beasts in her clenched fists, she took them down the passageway. It felt good to get two rats before midnight, and they were particularly ugly characters, the kind that would chew straight through a burlap sack to get at the grain inside, or knock eggs off the shelf so they could lick the mess from the floor.
She climbed the old stone stairs that led outside, then walked across the moonlit grounds of the estate all the way to the edge of the forest. There she hurled the rats into the leaves. “Now get on outta here, and don’t come back!” she shouted at them. “I won’t be so nice next time!”
The rats tumbled across the forest floor with the force of her fierce throw, then came to a trembling stop, expecting a killing blow. When it didn’t come, they turned and looked up at her in astonishment.
“Get goin’ before I change my mind,” she said.
Hesitating no longer, the rats scurried into the underbrush.
There had been a time when the rats she caught weren’t so lucky, when she’d leave their bodies next to her pa’s bed to show him her night’s work, but she hadn’t done that in a coon’s age.
Ever since she was a youngin, she’d studied the men and women who worked in the basement, so she knew that each one had a particular job. It was her father’s responsibility to fix the elevators, dumbwaiters, window gears, steam heating systems, and all of the other mechanical contraptions on which the two-hundred-and-fifty-room mansion depended. He even made sure the pipe organ in the Grand Banquet Hall worked properly for Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s fancy balls. Besides her pa, there were cooks, kitchen maids, coal shovelers, chimney sweeps, laundry women, pastry makers, housemaids, footmen, and countless others.
When she was ten years old, she had asked, “Do I have a job like everyone else, Pa?”
“Of course ya do,” he said, but she suspected that it wasn’t true. He just didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
“What is it? What’s my job?” she pressed him.
“It’s actually an extremely important position around here, and there ain’t no one who does it better than you, Sera.”
“Tell me, Pa. What is it?”
“I reckon you’re Biltmore Estate’s C.R.C.”
“What’s that mean?” she asked in excitement.
“You’re the Chief Rat Catcher,” he said.
However the words were intended, they emblazoned themselves in her mind. She remembered even now, two years later, how